Appreciating beauty.

[dimreepr]

This, for me, gives rise to a fundamental question; are we the only species that can appreciate the beauty of the world around us? Does the appreciation of art/aesthetics stem from intelligence or is it innate in higher life forms?

[menageriemanor]

What IS beauty to appreciate, and do humans get to define it?

 

Seems to me, that humankind is pretty indiscriminate about beauty. Most agree vistas, water in many forms, many trees, flowers etc are usually supremely beautiful, but a percentage are going to wax lyrical about many 'modern art' pieces, that would be assumed to be a new, unexplained road sign, or loose skip materials, by many humans, if not labelled with a famous name and in a gallery. Or, a lone white pot, in a white, clinical, otherwise empty room?

 

Most undomesticated animals have the rural picturesque as their office. Except that not only do they attend to shelter and eat and raise or father families, but at any given moment, they have to be ready to flee or fight for their lives. Put an animal in a bare cage, with an area to avoid being stared at, and it will still show signs of stress, even if given plentiful and quality food and water. Add entertainment, things to do, and they are happier, but they need and desire more as a permanent, enjoyable home. If you rescue animals, you can see them blossom.

 

If an animal faces potential death every day, in a rural beauty spot, wouldn't they, like us, concentrate on picking out potential danger spots. potential safety spots, likely food zones and likely spots to run into mates/rivals? Registering any changes from last visit would far over ride admiration of form.

 

If death were possible or probable, each day, in places of outstanding natural beauty, how often would we stand relaxed, and simply take in the view, beautiful or not? If you were aware that in natural beauty spots, you would likely die, or that you could sneak into an old galvanised barn, find food, warmth and lots of perfect hideyholes made to enable safety, or a choice of escape routes, even if pretty roughly knocked together scrap wood, if THAT made your heart beat settle with relief as no place in the wild, picturesque woods did, would an animal - or humans, begin to view IT as the most desirable place on earth, and so, places that resemble it, desirable, (and so beautiful)? Altho we can easily die in beautiful woods, we rarely do, today, and don't associate it with fighting for our lives, but you only have to go back to the 16th, 17th century, for wild beauty to be feared and loathed. Gardens were only beautiful when clipped and controlled to the last leaf, and laid out in geometric shapes, to be viewed as nature tamed by man, Every ghastly wild vista was to be tamed and worked for profit or prestige by men.

 

We mostly all adore the look of rural cottages of Britain, pre 1850, but is that because they have been imprinted with the idealised country life we imagine coming with the cottage? Uneven floors, tiny windows, pokey rooms, bad ventilation, inconvenient ceilings, but roses around the front door! And cutesy dormer windows in the roof... In 1450, with the chamber pots emptied out the front, parents sleeping behind a blanket, in a corner of a room, and 8 children, and possibly some grandparents, some in varying stages of dying, in 4 stinking, dark rooms... put them in ugly modern emergency accom, and they would probably swoon over it, once over their fright. Whilst most want to swap apartments for dream rural cottages, if you don't get to add all mod cons, most of us would rather loathe the sight of it, after a while.

 

A rough little purpose built nest box in a tin shed with a kindly kept feeding station could well be the perfect cottage for a hedgehog, bird, or in Oz, a possom or snake, to imagine, IF they did, as their ideal of beauty or form. Perhaps, like some tourists, they may not be able to tell you what the definition of beautiful is, but they know it when they see it.

 

So, what is beauty to appreciate? Do we appreciate the things animals see as most desirable and therefore beautiful? We certainly don't appreciate their claims to it, beautiful or not.

 

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[dimreepr]

Beauty has always been recognised as a subjective experience and that subjectivity is determined through circumstance, both external and internal, and has always been examined. But that’s not really the question here; it’s more, do animals share our aesthetic appreciation?

http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9YPAeCcbkVcC&oi=fnd&pg=PA21&dq=animal+studies+of+aesthetic+appreciation&ots=57sPpOptE8&sig=pmivHs4bSIzW5HQVvwNVa6PKvso#v=onepage&q&f=false

Not only is it unlikely that there has been direct selection for these capacities, but they also share with reading and writing the status of being supported by cognitive capacities that probably evolved for other reasons. Consistent with their being capacities that require considerable training and cultural support to develop, there is wide individual and cultural variability in artistic phenomena. Yet despite this cultural boundedness and a fundamental break with biology, there is surprising species universality as well. Even though artistic expression does not “come naturally”, as does language and much social behavior, it is essentially culturally universal in some form or other.

This suggests it’s not an obvious question.

Edited February 18, 2013 by dimreepr

[Bill Angel]

 

This, for me, gives rise to a fundamental question; are we the only species that can appreciate the beauty of the world around us? Does the appreciation of art/aesthetics stem from intelligence or is it innate in higher life forms?

 

 

Interesting essay on Animal Aesthetics:

http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=243#FN54link

To quote from this article:

Yet there is strong evidence that the females do perceive the beautiful as such. With peacocks, for instance, a slight variation of the beautiful ornaments can already reduce and even ruin the chances of mating. So there is an extremely close correlation between the female preference and the elements constitutive for beauty, which more than suggests that precisely the elements constitutive of beauty are perceived and esteemed. If, as sociobiologists assume, they were to be grasped as indications of something else (fitness), it would be extremely unlikely that precisely the minor modifications which lead to failure with respect to beauty (and beauty is a precarious phenomenon) should cause equally intense failure in the different order of fitness. Thus, according to all evidence, it is indeed the beauty characteristics that are perceived and positively reacted to.

In other words, the author is asserting that female peacocks respond to the aesthetic beauty of the male, and select mates based on this criterion.

[dimreepr]

 

 

I think this by N K Humphries in his lecture ‘The illusion of beauty’ goes someway to answer that point.

 

 

If I give a hungry dog a solution of saccharine it will lap it up; if I show a cock robin a bundle of feathers with a red patch on its underside the robin will attack it; and if I show a man an abstract painting or play him a piece of music ne will, if he thinks it beautiful, stop to watch or listen. In each we have an animal performing a useful and relevant piece of behaviour towards an inappropriate sensory stimulus. But there is, I agree, a rather basic difference, namely that in the first two cases we have a good scientific explanation of what is going on, while in the third case we’re almost ignorant. With the saccharine and the red-breasted bundle of feathers we know what the artificial, illusory, stimulus corresponds to in nature and we know the dogs or the robin’s behaviour would in normal circumstances contribute to its biological survival.

 

 

 

One of the central problems of aesthetics has always been that, in man at least, there is no clear consensus. The point was forcefully made by Maureen Duffy in her review of Jane Goodall’s book ‘In the shadow of man’. Jane Goodall had written “But what if a chimpanzee wept tears when he

heard Bach thundering from a cathedral organ?”, to which Miss Duffy replied “what indeed if an Amazon pigmy or a 19^th century factory hand wept tears at such a minority western cultural phenomenon?”.

 

 

 

The more I find to read about human perception of aesthetics the more I find it inextricably linked to our cultural influences, driven in part by the critics. This leads me to wonder if this appreciation is

part of natural human sociability, then maybe it’s even more inextricably linked to language. Possibly the complexity of the language is tied to the strength of the phenomena?

 

[Bill Angel]

Here is another interesting paper:

Symmetry perception in humans and macaques

The Summary from the paper is shown below:

In summary, the approach taken by Sasaki and colleagues is exciting, and opens several promising research avenues. First, by establishing a correlation between psychophysical perception and neural activity in humans, the study paves the way for a deeper understanding of the relationship between symmetry perception and its underlying neural basis. Second, the parallel investigation of symmetry perception in humans and macaques lays the groundwork for future physiology studies directed at a better understanding of the cellular mechanisms that are involved in this fundamental perceptual ability

My belief is that the perception of beauty is closely related to the perception of symmetry. For example, which of these two flowers would the viewer consider to be more "beautiful"? Most people I think would select the top tulip as more attractive, compared to the bottom one. FYI: the second tulip actually grows that way, it is not diseased.

 

 

Red Tulip

This is a Tulip!

Edited February 19, 2013 by Bill Angel

[dimreepr]

 

 

It’s certainly a promising line of inquiry (interesting read +1) and without doubt facial symmetry in attractiveness has been well

established and is probably innate in a number of higher life forms. A caveat, though, does it explain all that we find beautiful? There are many famous examples of asymmetric art also landscapes and music. Does this further appreciation stem purely from our culture or language and can this also be found in our furry friends?

[Bill Angel]

Symmetry need not be as simple as that of a flower. There is also fractal symmetry.

A lot of the aesthetic appeal in nature, for example the beauty of a mountain range or a snowflake can be understood as an expression of fractal symmetry.

In any case I like the aesthetics of this video, which is a rendering of fractal symmetry.

[dimreepr]

 

 

Indeed, most appealing, yet a lot of what’s considered beautiful is asymmetric.

 

This for instance...

 

 

[cladking]

 

 

 

This, for me, gives rise to a fundamental question; are we the only species that can appreciate the beauty of the world around us? Does the appreciation of art/aesthetics stem from intelligence or is it innate in higher life forms?

 

 

 

 

 

I doubt that it is either. I have to believe that beuaty is simply a resonance between ourselves and nature. When a musical score touches an emotion or a woman of exceptional beauty is seen we simply are resonating with it. This accounts for the fact that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and why people who hate being up early are less likely to appreciate a beautiful sunrise. Animals see beauty and not only will resonate with it but try to relate and even communicate sometimes.

 

Beauty is inherent in all things though it sometimes hides behind many layers of ugliness.

[Bill Angel]

In the article Why We Love Beautiful Things

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/opinion/sunday/why-we-love-beautiful-things.xml

The author states

Certain patterns also have universal appeal. Natural fractals - irregular, self-similar geometry - occur virtually everywhere in nature: in coastlines and riverways, in snowflakes and leaf veins, even in our own lungs. In recent years, physicists have found that people invariably prefer a certain mathematical density of fractals - not too thick, not too sparse. The theory is that this particular pattern echoes the shapes of trees, specifically the acacia, on the African savanna, the place stored in our genetic memory from the cradle of the human race. To paraphrase one biologist, beauty is in the genes of the beholder - home is where the genome is.

If as this writer asserts "beauty is in the genes of the beholder", then concepts of beauty might be encoded in the genome of other primates. It's just another way to say that certain patterns resonate in our minds as attractive, and similar patterns instinctually resonate in the minds of other primates.

[SamBridge]

Ultimately all beauty cannot be classified as stemming from a single cause which makes other possibilities likely, there are obviously different views of what is beautiful and what isn't. Some is from environment such as that you think something looks well because you are use to it and are not use to other images, some beauty is caused through sexual attraction, other beauty is caused though a pique of curiosity, or inspired from that which brings about emotions. I would guess many other animals can experience at least two of those. Certain bugs and mammals are certainly attracted to objects such as flowers for their colors, and not necessarily their smell.